About DevTopics

DevTopics is a high-level and sometimes satirical look at software development and computer technology. DevTopics is written by Tim Toady, the founder of Browserling Inc, a cross-browser testing company. When we occasionally dive into the details, it's usually about C# and .NET programming. (More)

Social news sites first became popular when Digg.com launched on the Web in 2004. A social news site enables its users to submit news stories and vote on them. The most popular articles percolate to the top of the list and are rewarded with a huge surge in Web traffic. A candid discussion of each article often appears. The most popular social news sites are Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon, which recently hit 2 million registered users. DotNetKicks is an excellent social news site for .NET programming.

The leading SEO (Search Engine Optimization) sites will tell you that placing an ad after the first post in your blog’s home page is particularly effective. This is because the ad is essentially embedded in the blog content, hence your readers are less likely to develop “ad blindness” and skip over the ad as usual.

Blogs are becoming an important and prevalent method for software developers to share knowledge, tips and code. Unlike code-sharing sites that have publication guidelines and restrictions, blogs are typically privately-owned, which gives developers freedom to deliver and format their content in many ways. But this freedom can also result in a poor experience for the blog reader, ranging from code samples that won’t compile, to the equivalent of a messy desk where nothing useful can be found.

Following are several tips for software developers to write and manage their blogs, and to make the blogs easier to use and navigate for their readers.

What’s a Splog?

A splog or “spam blog” is a blog that steals content from other web sites, then aggregates and republishes all or some of the content on its own blog.

Splogs are created to promote and increase search engine ranking of affiliated web sites, and/or to make money from ads shown on the splog. Typically splogs are automated, but they can also be manual copy & paste. A recent study indicated that 56% of all blogs are spam, and there are over 575 thousand splogs reported.